WXTraffic.com is a free text banner exchange, I put this site together over a year ago, it’s using the walker software text exchange script as the backend, it’s the best script out there for running a text banner exchange, the script is $200, the site has a PR3, I think the design looks good but it’s pretty bad for search engines. I’m going to give the site a makeover to make it more search engine friendly.

The site has over 110 members at the moment, receives around 20 visitors a week.

To start this experiment we need to work out our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we are going to measure our success by. I’ve come up with these.

KPIs

• Traffic
• Members
• Revenue

They are simple KPIs, but in this case that’s all I think we need, we need to increase our traffic, increase members and in turn we should be able to increase revenue since revenue is directly related to traffic.

I’ve put together a simple spreadsheet to give us an indication of where we’re at with our KPIs. The sheet shows a weekly breakdown over the last 2 months, and a weekly breakdown for the next 2 months, it also have a number difference and a percentage difference with a simple coloured background to give us a visual idea if we’re improving or not. Under all of that are some graphs, again, a visual indication if we’re improving or not.

Marketing wise I’ve checked out the standard PPC networks, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter, the competition isn’t all that big, I think we can get it at about $0.30c per click, but since my highest offer I’ve had on this site was $300, I’m reluctant to spend much more than that to expand it.

I’m going to set a budget of $50 a week in marketing, I’m going to try some similar things that I’m going to be doing with myvisitioractivity.com and that’s to see if I can find some good links in forums and webmaster resource sites that I can buy, if not I’ll take this one to the PPC networks and pay by the click.